Elizabeth Price: ‘I’m interested in music and the voice because it brings a very different sensual and emotional register to the work’

Studio International visited Elizabeth Price in her studio in south-east London to talk to her about her work A Restoration, made for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

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Elizabeth Price outlined the important role sound plays within her multilayered creative practice. “Many of the works start off with quite a rational, almost procedural, approach to historical materials, but they always move into, or end up in, something that’s more like a song,” she said.

Price also discusses her residency at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space, the Science & Technology Council’s Space Science Department, where she became fascinated with photographic images of the sun, from the late-18th century to the present day. This archive, she tells us, is “scientifically purposeful and strangely melancholy”, and she has used these images in three works, “placing a dramatic situation of sight for everything else that happens in the work”.

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Price is currently curating an exhibition for Hayward Touring, In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy, which opens at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in June.

Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Elizabeth Price talking to Studio International at her south-east London studio, 4 May 2016. Photograph: Martin Kennedy.

Elizabeth Price talking to Studio International at her south-east London studio, 4 May 2016. Photograph: Martin Kennedy.